Knitterly Gifts And Special Friends

A thoughtful gift need not cost the world. Indeed, some gifts may not cost anything at all in monetary terms, but a truly thoughtful gift reflects both the sender and the person who is to receive it, and I know that I have in the past been truly touched by the thoughts of others.

When a friend who seeks to know you well, even if you are separated by hundreds of miles of ocean and continent, they pick up on the things that make you you. The needles above have come from the kindest of friends, though we have never ‘met’ who realises that I love monkeys and knitting alike, saw these and realised how much I would love them. And I do. They arrived with a beautiful bumper box of bounty which I am sure will all make an appearance on my blog over the next few weeks, bit by bit.

I have received a gift of yarn before, when I hit upon a few hard times and a friend sent me some of her unused stash. I still have some, because I always thought it too lovely for me to use, and I have been saving it for ‘best’. I have tried and I have failed to knit this absolutely gorgeous Cherry Tree Hill sock yarn before now, before deciding that whatever I knit wasn’t going to be beautiful enough and re-balling it up for when I was a better knitter:

But, really, I shouldn’t be scared of gorgeous yarns. I have become so entrenched in the ways of buying only what I can afford at the low end of the yarn spectrum that these special yarns seem like an indulgence I do not deserve. I treat them the same way as I do my food. When I eat I start with the least appealing, least tasty item on my plate, to ‘get it out of the way’ as it were, to save the most tasty item which I most look forward to until the end, at which point I am inevitably too full to eat it. What joy can my friends who have sent this beautiful yarn for me to use find if I am scared of it and keep it sealed away? So, once my £1 a ball Kaffe Fassett socks (even though I do love this cheap and cheerful yarn which seems to be on perpetual sale) are finished I will cast on with something lovely, because friends that have thought ‘Mimi will really enjoy that’ are always right, and sometimes I have loved something too much to think that I am worthy of it.